Mid-May in Maui, all-around energy soup of patani beans, baby sweet potato and sunflower greens. (The auntie at the Filipino store this morning said the beans and the sweet potato were perfect together for stock— and that’s just what I did, adding the softer vegetables later, steaming on the surface.) Into sunflowers lately; must be a natural food trend. My German-import strong bread is made of it. Trader Joes created its own sunflower butter with dark chocolate cup bites. After my forest run and freezing swim in the waterfalls pool, home was time for hot springs. Internal. Vegetables here are as wild as they grow without seasons because of the perennial growing climate for them. And that’s the beauty of eating on the island: you are assured of the locality of your food that will nourish you now. In my spices cupboard are kosher rock salt, in-a-grinder-bottle black peppercorns, and good olive oil from Napa Valley. My style is to let the vegetables flavor themselves, and the minimal spices I add maximizes the effect of their deliciousness like a sweet quick kiss to the broth. With both hands I lift the bowl from either side to my lips, and in a contra-osmosis experience sipping the hot soup is slowly imbibing in me. I cook the greens whole, I never break or cut even the ends or tips, yes, I wash and lightly scrub tuber roots with running cold water, but otherwise all go in the pot with the universe that made them. The Beitou hot springs in Taiwan is one of my favorite natural ecosystem destinations in the world. I imagine being there again every time I make a “hot springs” food home, when it starts pooling inside my heart.
I missed a Sunday blog (last Mother’s Day). This is its substitute, until I return to the “clock” this weekend. I was away, and the trip was almost, no, is definitely dreamlike, as if meeting the love of your life for the first time again. Seeing would-be best friends that would endure more than a generation in your life like for the first time again, and they glow ageless in your eyes. Even if the cemetery that you visited, though a reminder of death, because your constitution as an individual held you up, you had felt endeared in the absence of family and your mother was there, for you are eternal to her the first time she held you in her arms. You walked in the City of Roses as if the first time it would be your home twenty years ago. Spring was in full bloom. Dogwoods captured your senses like for the first time again, as the purple blue micro-flowers of the rosemary bush. Community-focused restaurants spilled their vibrance on the sidewalks of leafy neighborhoods, and that golden-age you would have indeed belonged to all those years ago was back. I wrote a poem at the Cafe Nell that night I returned to my dream.
Because it was real.
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